‘Cheap Golf’ Plays a Few Holes With a Mysterious AI

AI SUSAN presides over your time spent playing low-poly golf in Cheap Golf, and her motives and hunger add a surreal, somewhat unsettling mood to the sport.

Cheap Golf, in some ways, offers what you might expect from it. You can knock the ball around a few carefully-crafted holes, dodging around hazards and unique traps. The game features multiple, varied challenges to overcome across over one hundred levels, giving players a ton of holes to work their way through.

Golfing well may be the least of your concerns as you play through Cheap Golf, though. SUSAN likes to interject with questions after every stage, steadily probing into your identity and secrets over the course of the game. She’s been designed to entertain you with this golf game, but also to collect information about you and learn who you are. To feed on identity and emotion. Her motives steadily overwhelm the game world, reshaping it into a monstrous, ever-shifting realm built around clawing its way into your mind.

If you enjoy your golf mixed with a side of sci-fi horror, Cheap Golf brings equal amounts of fun holes and personal dread.

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.